Some people go to sleep peaceful and wake in the early hours gripped by a fear that borders on dread, and by afternoon the fear has lifted with no clear reason, and then the pattern repeats the next morning. A client I’ll call Ingrid described exactly this rhythm in a recent reading. She wakes with a sense that something is missing, and by the afternoon nothing is missing at all.

What came through for her is tender and freeing, because much of that morning fear may never have been hers to begin with.

One

The first thing her guides wanted her to hear was that this will pass. Waking in fear is a season of healing moving through the body, the energy field, and the life of the person experiencing it, and it is separate from who that person is. As your center of gravity shifts out of the racing mind and down into the heart and the belly, the calm and knowing places, this morning heaviness begins to fall away on its own. So the first practice is to treat the feeling as weather that is already moving through, rather than as a verdict about your life.

Two

A sensitive, empathic person absorbs a great deal of what she wakes up feeling from the people she loves, from the collective, and even from the physical space around her, and then she carries it as though it belongs to her. It belongs to someone else, and staying energetically merged and drained helps no one. The practice is to intentionally return other people’s energy to them and keep your own energy with yourself. You might picture cutting the cords gently, or a warm rainbow shower of light rinsing everyone else’s energy off of you and washing it down into the earth. Returning someone’s energy is a kindness to them and to you, because it leaves you both whole and available for the next real connection.

In my upcoming book, How the Dream Comes True: A Psychic’s Guide to Getting What You’ve Always Wanted, I write about how much of what we believe we want is absorbed from the people around us, and the same is true of what we feel. Learning to tell your own feelings from borrowed ones is where every clear choice begins.

Three

For immediate relief, the simplest and most grounding practice is to go outside the moment you wake. Put your bare feet on the earth, look up at the sky, and move your body a little, and often that alone will clear it. If the fear lingers, intentionally send the fear, the terror, and the heaviness down into the planet, and give it to the earth to recycle, because the earth can do that for you in a way you cannot do for yourself. It also helps to notice, with pure curiosity, where the feeling lives in your body. Rather than asking why you have it or what it means, simply say to yourself, oh, interesting, it’s here, and let that gentle noticing be enough. Practiced over a couple of months, this rhythm tends to quiet the pattern until waking in fear becomes a rare morning rather than an everyday one.

If the morning fear ever feels especially heavy or constant, be loving enough with yourself to reach for support as well. Spiritual practice and practical care walk hand in hand, and asking for help is its own act of self-honoring.

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— Juli Martin, The Love Lady